Saturday, January 19, 2008

Free Falling

Last Sunday, one of my writing/critique groups did a free write. The prompt had two sources. One was a picture book called, “The Beach”, by my friend, C.H. Paquette

The other was from me. The piece had to start with the words, “I once dreamt …”.

The instructions were to find a picture in the book and begin with the prompt and write for 10 minutes. At the end, we were to identify the picture based on the writing. I was pleased with the results, published below.

All comments and thoughtful critiques are welcome.

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The Sky is Big

.

I once dreamt I was a bird. I was high over the mesa.

The sky was over me, under me, holding my wings

The sky was big, but small as I was, I was bigger, bigger than when I was tied to the earth.

I was a hawk in the daytime. I was an owl at night.

My brothers were scared of me, hooting in the tree outside their bedroom window.

My grandmother talked to me in an old language that no one else understood.

But I did.

I could hear her thoughts.

She knew I was a bird sometimes.

I thought maybe she was too.

*G. Fitzgerald lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, is editor of the annualSertoma Writers' Anthology, was very impressed by her one visit to NewMexico. She is the author of 3 novellas and is working on one fromwhich this dream is an excerpt. http://stores.lulu.com/gefitzg

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Tantalizing

I
once dreamt I was standing near the road. My printed, calf length
dress blowing against my body as cars whisked by and wisps of hair
blew gently against my face. Sometimes I was afraid the skirt
would blow up and I would reach down and hold it against my thigh.
I mused, maybe if it did blow up that would bring business to my
lonely roadside stand.

Marilyn
Monroe didn’t need talent, she was a business woman in her
way”. I snorted a sigh as I looked up at the sign above
my head, “so much for advertising my eggs, melons, tomatoes,
and other tantalizing gifts of sun, soil, and toil.”

Swish,
another car, another look, but no buyer. I rearrange the honey,
smile – “good business you know”, looked up the
road with hope swelling in my chest. This time I see a car
coming over the hill, two minutes until – swish. Maybe,
maybe not, I say to myself as I hike my sun browned leg up on the
chair and tighten my shoe laces. The car slowed – my leg
wobbled the chair as I brought it slowly down in the dust and
straightened up just as the car pulled off the road into the grass.
At that moment I knew I could do business like Marilyn Monroe.
I straightened my printed dress skirt, smiled the best southern girl
smile I could give and asked the gentleman, “would you like to
buy some fresh melons from the garden?”

The good stuff, the right stuff, was white. And that, that should be avoided, the black, was clear and distinct. In the dream, my life was a circle neatly divided and all the right things were to the left; shining and white. Then there was the divide into those things that were the other side. Regret, despair, and disappointment. What a clear and organized dream.

But, as I walk through each day with my eyes wide open, my life is not so easily divided.

Left and Right.

Black and White.

Instead it is a stripe here, abutted to the shadow. The white so narrow – the black so wide. And the texture too … drifting grains of black sand, bleeding into the white; the white fading to black.

Oh how I wish I could return to my orderly dream. That the white was wider, and easily kept to; and the black so thin, it was easily skipped over or brushed away.

* MitMoi lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. By day she works with one and zeros, helping customers to decipher their meaning. By night she types away in herblog, trying to make sense of her world and telling a story or two along the way.